But it's still on the list . . .

September 2008

09/30/2008

Just one of those weeks where I stare at this blank page called my blog posting, and try to think of what to write about. I suppose I could again point out the sorry lack of a Vox posting app for iPhones. Maybe it's because Vox is free and WordPress isn't? But, then again, there's a Facebook app for iPhone. And a MySpace one. And those are both free as well. Not that I'm saying Vox is like Facebook or MySpace (thankfully). But it seems to me that an app that would allow text entry with a title, and then store that entry on the iPhone until there was a connection to upload over, that'd be pretty slick. I'd work out one for myself, but it'd be beholden to whatever interface changes might happen around here, and then I'd have to be in this constant sort of race between me and Vox whenever my app broke for whatever reason. And I just don't have the time for that right now.

09/26/2008

Just giving the old Vox updates a try via Google Chrome today. Since it runs on the same rendering engine as Safari, I expect I'll get the same weird extra spaces in my posts whenever I dare to separate my paragraphs properly.

Like there.

Lotus had her first ever school, um, performance type thingy last night. It was fun to watch, and nice and short. They did this sort of hip hop version of some classic nursery rhymes, like Humpy Dumpty and Baa Baa Black Sheep. And then they came out into the audience to dance with their parents to this rather absurd song that's sort of like a cross between Simon Says and The Hokey Pokey. There's video. No, I'm not going to show you how I dance.

Ladybug, evidently, started crying. Something about the whole "growing up" thing. Maybe I was too busy dancing and video taping to notice, but this performance didn't affect me the same way as leaving Lotus for 5 hours with our friends at a remote camp site did. We all react to different things, I suppose.

09/24/2008

Over the weekend we went camping with our friends. You may recall that we did a similar sort of thing lastyear. We're going to try to make it at least a yearly thing. We stayed up at Knoll Lake, which is a lovely area of forest.

The other thing that we've done yearly so far is to have to leave the camping area to go get something in town. We'd like to be able to not do that next year. This time, sadly, it was medical supplies. Poor Tesla, she's just 2 now, and still a little unstable, and she tripped on something, and reached out to grab the nearest thing she could to keep from falling on the ground. Unfortunately, the nearest thing was the iron fire ring. And yes, there was a fire going in it at the time. And yes, we had told her about a billion times that it was hot and she shouldn't touch it and she shouldn't go near the fire, but she's 2, and sometimes it takes experience to know that your parents aren't just being jerks when they tell you not to do something. She didn't hang on or anything, she pulled her hands right back off, but she still burned her finger tips on one hand, and her wrist on her other hand. We doused her arms with cold water, and thought that was the end of it.

Apparently not.

Later in the morning, she was doing what she sometimes does, which is chase Ladybug around crying. She does this at home all the time. We're not sure why. Is it that the new baby gets all the attention? Probably. But she does it even if she's getting attention. She's very impatient, and gets upset when she can't do something that she thinks she should be able to do, but really, she's not supposed to be able to do it. Like drawing a circle. Last night she was almost inconsolable because she couldn't draw a circle. I can't draw a circle with any accuracy, and I'm like 18 times older than her. But she thinks she should be able to do it, and she can't do it to her own expectations, so she gets upset.

So, crying and chasing Mommy. Well, Mommy was a little tired from sleeping in a sleeping bag that wasn't keeping her warm enough (apparently), and not getting enough sleep, and dealing with the baby's feedings, and so on, so she asked me to take care of Tesla, which I tried to do, but she just kept crying and asking for Mommy (which, I have to stress again, is what she does all the time even on a normal day). So, I tried giving her a cookie, and holding her, and reading to her, and so on, and finally, after 90 minutes of non-stop crying, I had to just sit her in the car because it was getting on everyone's nerves. And we're sitting there, and sitting there, and sitting there, and she just won't calm down. She's sitting there with her fingers in her mouth, and her jacket over her wrist and she's just crying.

Oh, wait, right.

So, I take her hand out of her mouth, and her finger tips are blistering. And I roll up her sleeve and her wrist has got a really nasty blister on it.

Sigh. My only defense is that she wasn't acting out of the ordinary. I know, you're sitting there thinking, burn victims don't act ordinary. But seriously, she was acting like she always does.

Fortunately, one of our number is a nurse, so he bandaged her up, and sent us on a trek into town to get some more specific supplies. The drive put Tesla to sleep, and when she woke up, she didn't need any of the supplies anyway. She was happy as a clam, because someone finally figured out what was bothering her and did something about it.

Anyway, the trek into town was 5 hours long. So here's the next interesting thing: Lotus, our 5 year old daughter, for those of you just joining in, stayed at the campground with our friends, while Mommy and Daddy and Tesla and 3White (that's our new boy - named after his Dad and Grandpa) went into town. She wanted to stay. She even said bye to us when we left, so it's not like she didn't know we were going or something. She then made herself useful, carrying wood that Earth chopped (Earth is our nurse, by the way, the one who got married in Costa Rica last year), and even keeping track of our friend's fishing. She'd draw a circle on a paper when they'd cast, and if they didn't catch anything she'd put a line through it. Evidently, her commentary was hilarious. "Nope, didn't catch a fish that time!" The paper was all circles with lines through them. She never got bored with pointing out that they weren't catching anything. Not sure how Air and Fire were dealing with it, but they didn't kill her. Plus Water (Earth's wife) and Aegina (Fire's girlfriend, domestic partner, whatever) are there to protect Lotus from the big bad boys.

*sniff* My little girl is growing up.

3White basically slept the whole time. If you're gonna camp with a baby, I heartily suggest doing it with a 2 month old who sleeps a lot and doesn't mind a change of scenery. The most interesting thing he did was lie in the crib staring at the stars in his camo onesie.

09/23/2008

My new position has me writing code that will be used in K-12 educational institutions. Since it's primarily web based, we're supporting a wide range of browsers, from Safari 2 right up to IE 7. Those of you out there who might have had to do such a thing before know where I'm going with this.

But before we get there, let me back up. Most of the hard-core Java dev I've done up to now has been for corporate internal applications. This means that the browser support issue was pretty much decided for us. If the company used IE 6, we wrote everything for IE 6, and didn't really care if the exact same page would look like crap in Firefox 2, or Opera, or whatever. Even when I was working on a more publicly available application, now apparently defunct, we limited support to Windows (meaning, at the time, no Safari support), and pretty much required IE to interoperate properly with the DRM we ladled onto the application.

Wait a minute, maybe that's why it's defunct.

Moving on.

So now, I'm in an environment where we're supporting a grab bag of browsers, because not every school runs IE, or is even able to run IE. And maybe they're running older Apple hardware and can't run Safari 3. So we've got a supported list of browsers, and everything we do has to be vetted against the entire suite of browsers. It's complicated enough now, and we're not even officially supporting Firefox, Opera or Chrome yet. I hope Chrome will be trivial, since we're supporting Safari already, and they use the same rendering engine. And let's not even consider some of the, yes, esoteric browsers like Konqueror. Though, again, Konq and Safari use the same rendering engine.

Anyway, yesterday, my testing in Safari 2 revealed a major CSS issue. Basically, Safari 2's CSS parser was choking on something. So, I took the CSS in question, and ran it out to the W3C's CSS validator. Breakages everywhere. It looked to me like someone had tried to comment out some lines with a # inside the actual styles. So, I dumped those calls, and Safari 2 was happy. I tested in IE 6, in Safari 3, and in Firefox 3, just to make sure everyone was happy. They were.

Astute readers at this point have noticed an omission.

I announced my fix at the team meeting in the afternoon (in fact, my boss said, "Where's that issue with Safari 2 that I put in this morning?", to which I was able to reply, "I already fixed it"). At which point, my triumph came crashing down when another dev said that those crazy non-standard, non-validating entries were actually to support . . . .

IE 7.

Thanks, MS, for breaking the standard again. Can't be bothered to fix your stupid engine to work with the standard (or even to work the same way as IE 6 - stunning), you have to corrupt the standard. Even my boss was surprised; he'd never heard of IE 7 specific CSS entries. So, the other dev and I worked through it, and managed to come up with a CSS that worked for both Safari 2 and IE 7. Non-trivial to say the least. Fortunately, we were both equally guilty: he didn't test Safari 2, I didn't test IE 7. We'll both be more careful next time.

Anyway, we're going camping this weekend. Should be a blast. And my new job? It's awesome in so many ways, I can't describe, sitting here at my new desk in a t-shirt and sloppy-ish camping pants and sneakers, working on my primo system with dual monitors. Yeah.